This blog puts a spotlight on the labor activity in the U.S. South you don't read about elsewhere, always keeping it in context with what is going on nationally and internationally in the Global South as well. This blog also provides a historical and cultural (including music, literature, and art) perspective that takes into account the long, hard, and often bloody struggle workers have always had to wage whenever they tried to organize in this region.

Saturday, February 25, 2012

Creative organizing at Walmart, and another Southern pol brays about unions

Here's another short round-up from across the South, including a creative new approach to helping Walmart workers and the latest politician's braying in Magnolia Land

A new tactic with Walmart is working

A new strategy to push workers’ rights at the world’s largest retailer, Bentonville, Ark.-based Walmart, is utilizing what has been called “pre-New Deal unionism” and showing some real gains.

OUR Walmart and Warehouse Workers United (WWU), two initiatives backed by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), have organized public protests, informal meetings of workers, door-to-door membership recruiting campaigns, class-action suits against Walmart subcontractors, and strengthened contacts with workers along the retailer’s international supply chain.

According to writer Spencer Woodman in a compelling article in The Nation magazine’s January 23 edition, “thousands of employees in hundreds of Walmarts in more than thirty states” have joined OUR Walmart, a non-union, union-backed activist group seeking better wages and working conditions. WWU has also made inroads into the 100,000-plus warehouse workers at Walmart and its suppliers in getting them to stand up for their rights, whether as full time or “temp” workers.

Many of the groups’ biggest successes have been in California. However, a show of unity took place in Walmart’s own Bentonville headquarters last October. Walmart workers overcame their fears of retaliation to demand respect and better pay. They weren’t able to meet with Walmart CEO Mike Duke, like they wanted, but they made their voices heard.

“These worker associations bargain outside pre-established frameworks of negotiation, using any means legal to pressure management into recognizing their interests,” Woodman writes. It’s “an arrangement that closely resembles pre-New Deal unionism. With little institutional arbitration, this model can be seen as a rawer, more organic form of workplace struggle.”

The long, frustrating battle to organize union-hostile Walmart is well-known. However, the UFCW and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) have been pursuing different avenues for several years, particularly in establishing web sites to tell the truth about Walmart to the world. The UFCW’s Wake Up Walmart, which is now called Making Change at Walmart, and SEIU’s Walmart Watch helped force the company to try to clean up its image, taking on environmentally sensitive “green” projects and even endorsing President Obama’s healthcare plan.

Yet, as Woodman writes, Walmart’s new, spruced-up self emphatically did NOT include any changes in attitudes toward unions.

So the fight goes on. If true change does eventually come to the Bentonville company, the whole world will feel its effects.

And the anti-union braying in the South continues …

As reported in Facing South recently by Phil Mattera of Dirt Diggers Digest, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley has been braying the usual anti-union diatribes we expect from Southern pols wedded to their corporate backers.

“We’ll make sure the unions understand full well that they are not needed, not wanted, and not welcome in the state of South Carolina,” Haley said recently in her State of the State address. “We love that we are one of the least unionized states in the country.”

Let’s hope workers in South Carolina will someday realize what she is actually saying—that they shouldn’t have the opportunity or perhaps even the right to join together and speak as one voice in trying to better their lot. When and if they do, Nikki Haley will be retired to that donkey (no party affiliation intended) farm where she belongs, where she can bray all day long to all the chickens and the pigs on the farm. My bet is even they’ll walk away with a shake of their heads and a plan for a much better way to spend their day.